Kospi -3%: Heavy Selling, and I Just Watched

Kospi fell more than 3% today and Kosdaq slipped 1.37%, so both boards limped out of the session looking pretty beat up. Kospi took the much harder hit, and that gap tells you something about the kind of selling that went on.

Under the hood, foreigners and institutions dumped over 3 trillion won combined on Kospi alone (foreigners 2.2984T won, institutions 1.2184T won), and both groups were net sellers on Kosdaq too. That's a lot of supply for an index to absorb. Right ahead of the Fed meeting, Trump doubled down, saying he'd cut off trade with deficit countries if rates don't come down, and on top of that he and the Democrats clashed head-on over AI-risk policy — that extra dose of policy uncertainty seems to have made everyone's feet heavier. Even so, semiconductors and AI names held up relatively well while only fintech and biotech really got hit, which reads less like stock-specific trouble and more like a broad wait-and-see mood driving the selling.

Put that together with real-economy data that's clearly losing steam while the market mood itself stayed fairly calm, and today's drop looks less like fresh bad news and more like policy uncertainty landing on top of an economy that was already cooling. So I didn't touch anything today and just watched — in moments like this, I'd rather let the dust settle than rush in.